In April / May 2006, I moved across the country to Kansas City. Sadly, the exact date is lost to time. The best record I have is a handful of emails oriented around my job search and the birth of my niece. I’ve never really treated the anniversary as a special occasion. While I have given little thought to it for many years, this year feels different. More concrete and somehow more important. Realizing it’s 20 years since leaving my hometown gives me a new sense of urgency in life. Funny this all happens to land with a self-imposed deadline to evaluate my goals for the year.

Despite my best intentions for 2025, most of my goals for the year weren’t really executed upon. This year, my work-life balance has been a bit out of whack. Large work projects distract from things that matter at home and make it difficult to concentrate on personal projects with little energy left over for hobbies. Adding in the continual flood of near-existential crisis in about every aspect of life right now – and progress on any sort of “goal” metric slows down. I found a local club to engage with and have largely switched back to Linux for day-to-day computing. Those are huge wins, but many of the other 2025 goals were partially met at best.

In the past year, the cost of my multiple “life reboots” has hit really hard. Even a single change in work, change in city, or change in faith community costs friends and acquaintances. In many ways, my social network never recovered after my first “hard reset,” and the handful of soft reboots since haven’t helped the situation. Nor has the increasingly polarized political climate. I’ve found politics in general a cancerous subject that erodes friendships and minds.